As a precursor to my essay, I would like to state some philosophical revelations that support the views expressed herein. As demonstrated by famous existentialist such as Sartre and Nietzsche, man is constantly reinventing himself. And on that note:
If man recreates himself every moment, then a state of complete staticism may never be reached. And by staticism I mean a state in which change does not occur. If man cannot be static, then that would imply that mankind has an extremely dynamic nature. This, consequentially, would mean that the old man sitting at home watching reruns is as dynamic as the boy playing in a schoolyard with friends and learning new games. The difference in the two is not in their ability to learn of to unlearn, but rather, the manner in which they do so. A Prime Example of the duality property of dynamicism is in the afore mentioned situations pertaining to the old man and the young boy. The young boy learns new games and how to play them. In school, he learns how to add, how to divide and about a manner of other subjects of cultural and intellectual interest. His capacity to learn is significantly larger than that of the old man. However, his ability to refer back to previously acquired information is still growing as he has not yet experienced life at its fullest and has yet to realize many things about the world around him. The old man, on the other hand has gone through this crucial stage of development many times over and has an extremely large base of reference from which to pull information. Although man may always continue to learn and grow, his capacity to do so diminishes as he lives. This is one of the fundamental flaws in all men. Therefore, the dynamics of humans can be split into two sub-categories, Potential, which corresponds to the boy, and Learned, which corresponds to the old man.
i’ll drop by next time to share my idea on the matter–from the the buddhist perspective.